


Overporgulation

by chissprincess



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Not Canon Compliant, legends compliant, really i just wanted to put porgs in the empire, this is a massive load of fluff and ridiculousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 03:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13562070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chissprincess/pseuds/chissprincess
Summary: Thrawn gets two porgs as gifts. Thrawn brings his porgs back to the Chimaera. Thrawn's porgs escape. Of COURSE it's not easy to fix that little problem.





	Overporgulation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sithy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sithy/gifts).



> I like Thrawn and I like porgs. So I thought, why not put them together? Aaaaand this is the ridiculous result. I also like making up words with"porg" in them. "Overporgulation" = overpopulation - pop + porg.

“And now, to commemorate your most honorable visit to our humble little community, the schoolchildren of Pilot’s Peak would like to present you with a gift.” The mayor of the small city of Pilot’s Peak gave Grand Admiral Thrawn and his companions a rather oily smile. “Admiral, if you please…?”

Thrawn took a step forward and folded his hands in front of him while he waited for a group of giggling schoolchildren and their teachers to haul a rather large wooden crate up the steps to the stage. They set the crate down in front of him and the children giggled more as they scurried away, gathering in front of the stage. Thrawn motioned for Lieutenant Tschel to step forward and handle the actual opening of the box. From his spot farther back on the stage, Captain Pellaeon nodded. This was a wise move. Even from here he could hear the squeaking and scratching coming from the box. He doubted that even the slimy Rim-planet mayor would be horrible enough to endanger the lives of children by putting some trap in the box. 

Still, he hoped they wouldn’t be picking up pieces of Tschel to bring back to the Chimaera. 

Tschel didn’t seem the least bit concerned, though, only a bit confused as to why the box was so large and noisy. He took the crowbar one of the mayor’s aides offered and pried the lid off the top. He leaned forward to peer inside and stuffed his hand against his mouth to keep from…something. Laughing? Screaming? Pellaeon couldn’t tell. He sighed – Tschel was just so unprofessional sometimes. But apparently there was nothing dangerous in the box. So Thrawn himself leaned over to see as well, and reached into the box to pull out a…

“Porg!” the mayor exclaimed, and the delighted audience clapped and cheered. The noise agitated the chubby snub-nosed bird-creature in the Admiral’s hand, and it flapped its wings and brayed a high-pitched call. Either that or the clapping roused what was left in the box, and before Pellaeon’s eyes a second porg popped its head over the crate’s edge. The two animals were nearly identical, except that the one in Thrawn’s hands had orange markings around its eyes and the one in the box did not. Thrawn adjusted his grip on the first porg and scooped up the second one. 

“Porgs, are they?” Thrawn said, looking down at the fluffy creatures. They blinked their enormous black eyes back at him, and the orange-marked one yawned. “I thank you, they will make lovely companions,” Thrawn added. The mayor seemed satisfied, but Pellaeon could hear the skepticism in Thrawn’s voice.

*** *** ***

“How does one care for a porg, Captain?”

Pellaeon looked up from typing his report on his datapad and shook his head. “No idea, sir,” he said. He eyed the two porgs, currently sitting together on one of their shuttle’s seats. Thrawn sat across from them, head tilted. 

“Well, then, how does one determine a porg’s sex?” Thrawn asked. “I’m rather hoping to prevent them from reproducing.”

Pellaeon shook his head again. “I guess we just have to hope there’s something in the archives,” he said. 

The two sat in silence for a while, watching the sleepy porgs. Finally, Thrawn leaned over to gently scratch one under the chin. Or, well, where its chin would be if porgs had easily-visible chins. The porg trilled a high-pitched purr, and the other porg immediately butted its head against the Grand Admiral’s hand in an attempt to get attention too.

“I suppose they are cute,” Thrawn said. “They seem calm…Perhaps this will turn out well.” He alternated between scratching each porg. 

*** *** ***

It did not turn out well.

At first, it seemed that the two porgs were settling in just fine. Their box had come equipped with all the essentials – porg beds (Pellaeon suspected these were actually cat beds), a plain white bag full of crunchy bits labelled “porg food” (Pellaeon suspected there was no such thing as dedicated porg food and assumed this was food for some other animal), a large bag of grass for nesting material, a little booklet with instructions on how to turn the crate into a porg house (this task almost immediately fell to Tschel), and a pair of pictures printed on flimisplast with notes about each respective porg on the back. Apparently the children had named them Popcorn and Chocolate (Pellaeon had no idea what these things were – Thrawn claimed that chocolate was a food but had never seen or heard of popcorn before and suspected it was just something cute the children thought up). According to the cards, Popcorn liked sunshine and Chocolate liked sleeping and, by the way, nobody knew what sex either porg was. Pellaeon sighed upon discovering this omission, instructed Tschel to be careful with the power tools while he built the porg house, and returned to the bridge. 

“Captain,” Thrawn asked over breakfast one morning about a month later, “have you by any chance been feeding Chocolate your scraps under the table?” He was clearly trying to keep his tone casual. Pellaeon didn’t like that one bit.

“Er, no sir, why?” he asked.

Thrawn leaned over. A porg let out an indignant squawk and Thrawn sat up again, hoisting Chocolate into view. “This porg appears to be eating for ten,” he said. “Or at least it thinks it is, look how much weight it has gained in the past month.” Indeed, Chocolate looked substantially rounder than when the porgs had come on board.

Pellaeon shook his head. “No sir, I don’t feed them from the table. It’s better not to spoil them. Maybe they sneak down to the main cafeteria…”

Thrawn nodded and set Chocolate back down. He could easily imagine some of his more kind-hearted crew feeding the sad-eyed porgs if they begged even a little bit. Later that day, holoposters appeared on the walls: DON’T FEED THE PORGS and FOOD IS FOR CREW, NOT PETS and LEAVE PORG-FEEDING TO THE OFFICERS blazed in large red letters on each one. However, this did not seem to produce any change in Chocolate’s new-found rotundness, and Thrawn continued to be perturbed.

He became even more perturbed the day both Chocolate and Popcorn disappeared, though. At first he thought nothing of it, assuming they were simply being lazy in their porg house. He left their food bowls out as usual and went to work. By the time he returned in the evening, though, the food hadn’t been touched, and some quick investigating showed that the porgs weren’t in their little house after all. A few frantic comm calls revealed that not a single person had seen the porgs all day.

The posters were replaced with new ones: images of each porg, titled HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PORG? and captioned with polite requests to catch the porgs if possible, or to report porg sightings to Lieutenant Tschel for further investigation. These were accompanied by ADVICE ON PORG-CATCHING posters, bearing hints like “tempt them with food (yes you can feed the porgs now)” and “toss a blanket or towel over them, it confuses them and makes them easier to grab.”

But there were no porg sightings to be had, until three days later when a stormtrooper came to the bridge, carrying something wrapped loosely in a towel. When he was finally allowed to speak to the Grand Admiral, he unwrapped the tiny bundle. “We found it in that locker room that’s under repair in the stormtrooper quarters,” he said, voice distorted through his helmet. “Thought you should see it, sir.”

Thrawn and Pellaeon both leaned in for a look. A tiny ball of white fluff sat in the stormtrooper’s towel-covered hands, large eyes just barely opened and pink tongue sticking out of its mouth, which struck Thrawn as just a little too large for its body.

“What…is it, exactly?” Pellaeon muttered at his side. Thrawn just shook his head. He was about to answer when a piercing shriek sounded from the crew pit to his left. He winced away from the sound and threw a sharp glare in the crew pit’s general direction, just in time to see one of the communications officers scrambling up to the walkway and towards the stormtrooper. 

“A PORGLET!” she squealed, stopping dead next to the stormtrooper and leaning over to stick her face right in the little animal’s personal space. 

Thrawn decided not to be angry for the moment – it seemed his officer could give him some information. “A porglet?” he repeated.

She carefully gathered the little fluffball into her hands and snuggled it to her chest. This caused the porglet to let out a sound roughly identical to that of the cries of the damned, but she seemed to think this was the cutest thing in the universe and proceeded to nuzzle the top of the creature’s tiny head before answering her superior. “Yes sir, a baby porg.” She looked up at him. “I had no idea you had a mated pair. We should bring this little guy back to where he was found, his parents must be worried by now.”

“And maybe in the process we can catch them,” Pellaeon muttered to Thrawn. Thrawn nodded. Surely they could monitor the porgs’ nest now, and catch them when they returned to feed and warm the porglets. 

Thrawn, Pellaeon, Tschel, the communications office, the stormtrooper, and the porglet all trouped back down to the locker room. The place was an absolute mess, with parts of disassembled lockers scattered around, ladders and deactivated hoverlifts pile haphazardly along the walls, boxes of tools and buckets of paint resting beside half-finished rows of new lockers. The stormtrooper led them to one of the older lockers that hadn’t yet been demolished and opened the door. Thrawn and the others peered in around him.

Indeed, there was a nest in the locker, apparently made from bits of uniforms and scraps of flimsiplast and even what appeared to be clumps of human hair. But the nest was empty. “How many were there before?” Thrawn asked.

“At least six,” the stormtrooper replied. “I didn’t think they could move…”

“They can’t,” the communications officer said. “The parents must have come back, found one missing, and moved the rest.” She glanced around at the others’ faces. All were looking at her with various expressions of shock and disbelief, even the stormtrooper, who expressed his confusion by tilting his head. “Porgs are smarter than you think,” she said. “We used to raise them back home. They would get into anything if you didn’t stop them.” She leaned into the locker and tucked the little porglet back into his nest. A new round of damned-soul screaming erupted from the fluffball, and she patted its head. “Maybe they’ll come back for him.”

“Right. I want someone watching this locker constantly,” Thrawn said. “And if even one porg returns for the baby, I want every effort to be made to catch it.” He turned to the communications officer and added, “How quickly do porgs reach breeding age?”

She furrowed her brow a bit as she thought. “About two or three months,” she said. “They have to be quick about it, you know, they don’t come from a very hospitable environment originally.”

“Two or three months…and can porgs be sterilized?”

“Oh yes, but you’ll want a trained vet for that,” she said. “Otherwise it’s not safe.”

*** *** ***

They somehow missed their chance to catch either porg parent by using the porglet as bait. Months passed without a porg sighting, and soon Thrawn was convinced that his small pets and their offspring had perished deep in the _Chimaera_ ’s hidden nooks and crannies. After all, a Star Destroyer was no place for animals like that to run wild. For one thing, where would they get food or water?

The _Chimaera_ ’s food stores, that’s where.

“We’ve been hearing weird noises coming from the storerooms for ages, sir, but we haven’t been able to pinpoint anything,” the head chef said as he led Thrawn into the storeroom. “But whatever keeps getting in is doing a number on the food supply. Mostly the meat, fish, and protein replacements, but some of the fruits and veggies and grains too,” he said. “I found a whole big vat of potato mash just emptied.” 

Thrawn was only half-listening as he examined the damage. Something was able to chew through several layers of plastic wrap around the food. He could see tiny teeth marks in the wrap and in the boxes holding various food items. One large container of fish had been opened and several fish were missing entirely. A few others looked like they had been torn apart on the spot, leaving only the heads and backbones behind, and a small number had delicate nibbles taken out of them. As he continued his examination his feet suddenly flew out from under him, and he found himself lying face-down in a puddle of blue milk. Turning his head to the side, he noticed a barrel of blue milk at his side, and he could see where a hole had been chewed in the surprisingly flimsy barrel…and spied a pair of large eyes blinking at him from the shadows. He frowned and raised his head. The eyes blinked again and shifted position as a soft, questioning chirrup came from the shadows. Thrawn gritted his teeth and lunged at the animal, which screamed and flapped and managed to scratch up Thrawn’s neck as it barreled over the Admiral to escape. Even face-down in the milk he could hear men shouting and feet pounding as the chef and a few stormtroopers tried to catch the wayward porg, along with continued screaming from the porg as it escaped. Several choked human screams and the sound of people and things crashing into one another signaled the unsuccessful end of the attempt.

When Thrawn finally got up again, he found a stormtrooper sprawled in the pile of fish, another stormtrooper and a young officer trying to get up from where they had fallen upon crashing into each other, and the chef was covered in flour and clumps of vegetable puree. Pellaeon, apparently summoned by word of commotion in the kitchens, appeared moment later and gaped at the scene. 

“What HAPPENED?”

Thrawn cleared his throat and attempted to smooth his uniform jacket, but only managed to soak his hands in blue milk. “It appears, Captain, that the porgs have gone feral and are invading our food stores. From the looks of things, they are eating extremely well and probably also reproducing at a rapid rate. Clearly, we must take additional measures to control the porgs. You shall work with our kitchen staff to implement porg-proof food storage protocols. Meanwhile, I will be…cleaning myself up.”

An aggressive two-pronged campaign began on the _Chimaera_ that day, as carefully executed as any battle plan or political maneuvering. New posters went up: STORE YOUR SNACKS IN BITE-PROOF CONTAINERS and IF YOU CAN SMELL IT, THEY CAN TOO, HIDE YOUR FOOD BEFORE THEY DO and DON’T FEED THE PORGS AFTER MIDNIGHT OR ANY OTHER HOUR EITHER. Other posters implored all _Chimaera_ residents to CATCH THEM IF YOU CAN – WE MUST CATCH THEM ALL and BRING YOUR CAPTURED PORGS IN FOR IMMEDIATE STERILIZATION and CATCH IT, NEUTER IT, KEEP IT AS A PET. But the hands-down favorites (seriously, copies kept vanishing from the walls and turning up in barracks and private quarters) featured stern-looking holos of Thrawn. In the first, he pointed a finger directly at the viewer, under the words WE NEED _YOU_ TO CAPTURE THE PORGS. In the second, he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, surrounded by the words ONLY _YOU_ CAN PREVENT OVERPORGULATION. 

Peaceful moments were frequently interrupted with sudden scrambling and screaming as people of all ranks and roles would spot porgs and immediately dash after them. The porgs themselves seemed to think it was all a great game, and would allow their pursuers to chase them up and down hallways and through rooms before disappearing into ventilation ducts and other openings that were too small for the humans to follow. From time to time, someone would manage to catch a porg, and at the next planet stop a veterinarian would be brought on board to sterilize all captured porgs. It was soon discovered that the process made the porgs more docile, and before long it seemed like everyone on the ship had a porg companion perched somewhere on their being at all times. 

Finally, Thrawn awoke early one morning to find a dozen soft, furry faces with huge eyes staring at him. He raised his head slowly and glanced around. The porgs had invaded his bed, and were all piled on the clear spot beside his pillow, staring at him and barely even blinking. He glanced around, then whispered, “Chocolate? Popcorn?” Two porgs in the middle of the group flapped their wings and screamed, and soon the other ten had joined in. Thrawn sat bolt upright and tried to shush the animals. It took some effort, and they only really stopped when he finally got out of bed and filled their bowls with the remains of the porg food. He sighed, watching the porgs dig in. “You’re lucky you’re cute,” he muttered. “And you’re all getting fixed, you are NOT taking over my ship any more.”


End file.
